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Notes
Observations, fragments, and occasional essays drawn from sites, from teaching, from the incremental garden, from the gap between what a project is asking and what the place is already doing. The pieces are working documents, made visible as the thinking running in parallel of the projects is part of the practice rather than a supplement to it.
Some notes come from site readings that didn't fit on a project page. Others come from the incremental garden, where a hypothesis tested over five years can be summarised in a paragraph. A few come from teaching, where a student's question rearranges something the practice thought it had settled.
The categories aren't strict, the point is to let the reading and the questioning stay legible.
No. 1 - Landscape architecture is not a finihing layer
No. 2 - Improvement ≠ erasure
Landscape architecture is not a finishing layer
The most consequential decisions in an urban project are often made before the landscape architect is invited in the room. Strategies are set, programming too, the plot ratios are fixed, the road widths are drawn, the structural grid is fixed.
Somewhere near the end of the brief comes the line: landscape architecture. If the client doesn’t mistake us for garden designers / landscapers, this term embeds all the client desires: green look, shadow, biodiversity, rain water infiltration, furniture, paving layouts. What follows is mostly cosmetic and the spatial (and financial) reality is often cruel to the profession.
Narrow planted strips because of the width of the road, parking places, pathways, networks, curbs,... Green spaces but actual lawns as anything else would look messy or insecure. Attractive spaces with flowers but low maintenance, no berries nor fruits, it would attract rats. A lush tree canopy but only in narrow pits, leftover space between infrastructure and networks. Everywhere but only in selected spaces as some people train their dogs to bite on them (true stories). Lush green roofs but actually, the budget needs to be cut so Sedums will do the thing. Landscape is the ultimate adjustment, cosmetic, finishing layer.
This is more or less the position the discipline has been given, and a large part of the profession has accepted it. The acceptance is visible in the vocabulary: landscape as amenity, as softening, as integration. The green-credentials version - landscape as climate adaptation, biodiversity offset, stormwater management - is framed as a service rendered to a project whose form was decided before a landscape architect stepped in. The landscape architect is brought in late, to make a building feel less like a building and a parking lot feel less like a parking lot.
Landscapes as leverage (LLA) was founded as a response to this situation.
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What leverage means
The conviction that landscape is not a finishing layer is, on its own, a slogan. What gives it weight is what follows from it methodologically: that the landscape project should be positioned at earlier stages. Before the masterplan. Before the building. Where the question is still being formed.
This is what we mean by leverage. Not as a metaphor but as an actual mechanical leverage. The fulcrum is placed upstream, and what was a costly intervention at the end of a project becomes a structuring move at the beginning. A synergetic, landscape-based strategy produces fully functional ecosystems, benefits to inhabitants and visitors, and creates urban development gains no architect alone could have written. A material approach beginning with what is already there, in the soil of a neighbourhood produces a palette no developer would specify. A planting strategy spanning across twenty years produces a maintenance commitment a municipality would never otherwise have made.
This position is not new. Gilles Clément has argued for forty years that the gardener does not impose a form but reads the site and responds: the jardin en mouvement (Garden in Motion) as method. Pierre Bélanger, in Landscape as Infrastructure, names the same refusal at territorial scale: landscape is not a soft layer applied to infrastructure, landscape is the infrastructure. What LLA tries to do is to hold both claims at once (the value of the profession as a situated practice on the site itself, and as a structural actor at the territorial scale) while refusing the standard concession that one disqualifies the other.
The catalyst is the reading that precedes the design.
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What this looks like
In Saint-Étienne, the Furan valley has been engineered, buried, paved, and forgotten across two centuries of industrial reorganisation. Standard practice would treat the river as a constraint on the masterplan, avoiding flooding areas. Instead, we treated it as the masterplan. The river becomes the agent of change, the spine of a productive ecosystem and regenerative process along which housing, industry and public space are organised, not the other way around. The river is the leverage and starting point of the reorganisation of the location.
In Issoudun, a 1970s lycée had reached the end of its asphalt life. Standard practice would have depaved the courtyards, planted micro-forests, and added standard furniture. We proposed the depaving of 2,400 m², stacked the broken slabs in-situ as dry-stone retaining walls, and let the ground breathe for the first time in fifty years. In parallel, a maintenance plan proposed to gradually transform the existing lawns to meadow or shrubs over time with little effort. Here, demolition becomes the construction material, time an ally for renaturation.
In Cuzion, maintenance of a private garden in the Creuse has been quietly tested over a decade: what works, what fails, what teaches. This hobby became a laboratory for maintenance, plants, materials and a cultural barometer feeding our projects. The garden became a research instrument of experiment and an agent of change, not a decoration.
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What gets unlocked, and where the friction is
Once the landscape project is positioned upstream, it unlocks opportunities that were structurally impossible before. The conversation changes from what it should look like to what it enables - from where to fit it within the structure to what should the structure be in order to allow it - from a maintenance line item to a long-term ecological commitment and accompaniment.
This is also where the friction lives. Working this way takes longer, it requires consistent dialogue and a deeper understanding of every actor, it does not instantly produce glossy renders. A leverage practice asks for time standard contracts rarely give, and proposes commitments standard organisations are rarely equipped to make and follow-up on. The discipline has been complicit in its own marginalisation partly because the alternative is genuinely complex.
But by now, the cost of not doing it is visible everywhere. It is the cost of every public space that does not survive its first summer. Of every ecological development whose biodiversity scores are met on paper and contradicted on site. Of every neighbourhood improvement whose green layer is the last thing built and the first thing cut from the budget.
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Where we stand
We do not believe that landscape architecture is a more important discipline than architecture or planning. We believe it is differently positioned, that its specific work, when done seriously, is about negotiating between scales, between timeframes, between actors, between human and non-human, between what a site already is and what it could become. The landscape architect, in this reading, is a spatial negotiator.
Anna Tsing has a name for this kind of work: friction. As she explains: “Friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power”. It is the productive encounter between systems that do not necessarily share the same logic, where something new can be assembled if you are patient enough to stay engaged. LLA’s work, through its 3 main ambitions (re-entangling, re-wilding, re-rooting), follows from that.
Landscape is not what you add at the end.
It is the lever you reach for first.
FURTHER READINGPierre Bélanger, Landscape as Infrastructure: A Base Primer (Routledge, 2017).
Gilles Clément, Le Jardin en mouvement (Sens & Tonka, 1991); Manifeste du Tiers paysage (Sujet/Objet, 2004).
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton University Press, 2005).
Improvement ≠ erasure
In the early 2020s, the housing corporation Vestia and the municipality of Rotterdam started demolishing the Tweebosbuurt, a small and dense block in the Afrikaanderwijk neighbourhood, in Rotterdam Zuid. The buildings were not at the end of their structural life, they were also inhabited, predominantly by long-term, low-income tenants. The operation was framed in the language of urban renewal: improvement, mixed incomes, resilience. The actual operation was a clearance.
The Tweebosbuurt is the case that gives this note its title, but it is one among many across European cities. Improvement, in its official definition, is “an occasion when something gets better or when you make it better” (Cambridge Dictionary). Intuitively, this something would be a basis, a primary state aimed at evolving for the better. In today’s spatial register, improvement is more and more used as a cover for erasure and substitution. These words have become synonyms in contemporary urban policy. The Civic Anchors project, submitted to the 2026 Prix de Rome and the most developed argument about the future of Rotterdam Zuid, was conceived against that amalgam.
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A standardised practice
The standard model of urban renewal proceeds in three moves. First, a ‘problematic area’ is identified, statistically, through indicators of income, education, employment, or building stock condition. Second, comes the vision, a picture of the dreamed state of the area - a masterplan, renderings and a program - and this dream usually conflicts with the existing. Third, the existing fabric is cleared to make room for this vision, to enable the dream to happen. The clearance is presented as a necessary precondition for improvement. The displacement of residents is treated as collateral, or, in the most polished versions, as an opportunity.
This model is embedded in planning culture and questioning it can feel like questioning the possibility of urban improvement itself. But it rests on two assumptions, both debatable. The first is that the existing fabric is a problem rather than a resource. The second is that improvement requires erasure. Both are tabula rasa thinking, and both have a specific urban tradition through history running from Haussmann, Le Corbusier, Moses, and Ceaușescu through to the post-war reconstruction logic that still orients much European housing policy. In Expulsions, Saskia Sassen has called the global version of this logic by its right name: not renewal, but a “savage sorting of winners and losers”, a structural vision for separating the people a city wants to host from the people it does not.
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The city as a stratigraphy
The civic anchors project proposes a different reading of Rotterdam Zuid. It does not consider it as a problem to be cleared, but as a stratigraphy to be worked with. The project’s central model, a physical, three-dimensional object, reads the territory through four layers.
The underground, a city’s physical support. The geology of Rotterdam Zuid is largely made of silt and clay deposited over peat. Many of the buildings are anchored to a firmer layer by wooden piles. Those piles, kept underwater for a century thanks to the high groundwater table level, are now rotting as the water level decreases. The “sinking neighbourhood” problem is real, and it is geological as much as it is social. Any honest urban project here has to engage with the ground.
The paper reality, the city’s frame, guidelines and ambitions. Decades of plans, visions, frameworks, and pilot projects are shaping a layer of dreams and expectations. It exists in documents but not always in built form. Residents read this layer as ambitious yet broken promises as they never fully landed in their own reality. Designers read it as inheritance, a pile of ambitions and programs that needs to land. Either way, it conditions what is possible.
The social sediments, as the city’s real makers. The superposed patterns of use, occupation, community structure, mutual aid that develop in a neighbourhood over generations. This is the layer the standard renewal model considers absent, whose erasure cannot be made up for in decades.
The civic anchors, as catalysts. Specific places where the other three layers converge, and where a precise intervention can produce meaningful change. Not a masterplan. Not a vision. A small set of catalysts placed with care.
------What lithopuncture proposes
The word lithopuncture comes from the Slovenian artist Marko Pogačnik. In the 80s and 90s, he developed a practice of placing carved stones at specific points in a landscape. Initially, he found these points through an esoteric language, but these can also be read soberly as places where multiple territorial systems intersect. The term could be borrowed into urbanism, where it sits inside a longer tradition of urban acupuncture actions (the superblocks of Barcelona, the BRT and Câmbio Verde in Curitiba, the Medellín cable-car interventions amongst others).
The shared insight across these practices is the same. Massive interventions are not always more effective. Where a place is dense with overlapping systems, the right small intervention can become a lever, unlocking many potentials.
Civic Anchors borrows the technique to adjust the politics. Urban acupuncture can be read as a way for the municipality to act as a soft power, without committing to anything structural, a small public infrastructure can act as a substitute for housing policy. Lithopuncture follows this thinking while adding a layer, working from and with the structural layers of a neighbourhood. The point is to act with precision, anchoring the program in the territory, enabling social and economic opportunities, giving residents collectively a right to shape and develop it.
------Improvement = engagement
If improvement is to mean anything other than erasure, three things have to change.
First, the existing fabric (physical and social) has to be treated as the starting condition, not as the problem. This is a methodological change before being a political one: it changes what you survey, what you draw, what you propose. It is the difference between arriving with a vision and arriving with questions, thinking short-term or long-term.
Second, the timeline is extended. A two-year renewal project cannot improve a neighbourhood that has taken decades to become what it is. Real improvement happens with engagement, over the same timescale as the conditions it is trying to address. This process points to the real problems: the rules of engagement (budget, politics, procurement). None of these can be solved by design alone but design can act as a negotiator between actors.
Third, the residents have to be treated as the main clients, not as stakeholders, nor only for community input or participatory phases. Henri Lefebvre’s Droit à la ville, further sharpened by David Harvey in Rebel Cities, voices this claim as a collective right to “the freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities,” a right to shape the processes of urbanization rather than powerlessly receiving their outcomes.
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Towards a systemic re-evaluation?
Cody Hochstenbach gives that abstract right operational content. According to him, adequate housing is affordable, appropriate to the household, secure against arbitrary eviction, healthy, safe, in locations that give access to work, schools, family, and social networks. Six minimum conditions. Civic Anchors is, finally, a design proposal built on the claim that these are the conditions a renewal project must protect, not the conditions it is allowed to disrupt in the name of improvement.
The Rotterdamwet is one instrument of a longer policy track. In Uitgewoond, Hochstenbach traces its origin back to a 1989 paper by then state secretary Enneüs Heerma: a deliberate, thirty-year project, supported across the political spectrum, subsidising home ownership, courting real estate investors, and progressively shrinking and stigmatising the social housing sector. Housing corporations were stripped of their mandate to invest in neighbourhood liveability and reduced to last resort housers.
The clearance of the Tweebosbuurt is not an accident of that policy. It is its logical product, the disposal mechanism for a population that policies had already marked as unwanted. The discipline of landscape architecture has, mostly, stayed silent through this. It is time the discipline used its voice.
Improvement ≠ erasure.
Untangling them is part of what design is for.
FURTHER READING
Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville (Anthropos, 1968).
David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, 2012).
Cody Hochstenbach, Uitgewoond: Waarom het hoog tijd is voor een nieuwe woonpolitiek (Das Mag, 2022).
Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Belknap, 2014).
ARTICLES & RESOURCES
David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (2008). > Link
Saskia Sassen, “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers,” Globalizations 7, no. 1 (2010): 23–50. > Link
Cody Hochstenbach, interview with Julia Maria Keers, “Uitgewoond” (2023). > Link
Veerle Alkemade & Catherine Koekoek, “A place to dream. Infrastructures for activism,” Archined (September 2021). > Link